Your company's two biggest time sucks — and how to fix them

The time employees spend in unproductive meetings or reading through a slew of irrelevant emails is costing businesses billions of dollars a year. In fact, according to collaboration software provider Atlassian, businesses waste an average of $37 billion each year on unnecessary meetings and $1,800 per employee annually on email inefficiencies.

Many have argued that it’s time to do away with email entirely. Even Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz argued that this decades-old method of communication is about to die.

This, however, is just not realistic. Email is here to stay, and in-person meetings are incredibly valuable as a way to catalyze ideas and pursue innovation. They’re just horribly inefficient and wasteful if all you’re doing is “catching up.”

Unless you’ve found a magic way to create 28 hours in a day, the key is to avoid the things that waste the precious time you have. Here are some ideas.

No more status meetings

Want to be much more effective? Then repurpose your conference room:

Meetings should never be held for informational purposes only. Yet, a third of meetings still serve as “status updates,” which are a colossal waste of time and money. In fact, the average employee spends roughly 31 hours a month on unnecessary meetings and 91 percent of employees admit to daydreaming during meetings where no immediate participation is required. Simply put, don’t hold a meeting unless there is an actionable task to accomplish.

Treat meetings like a huddle, and when you’re bringing everyone into the loop, do it standing up. Participants literally stand during the meeting! Standing enforces a sense of urgency, so these types of meetings are almost always shorter and more efficient, and people find it much harder to be distracted by their laptop, smartphone or even daydreams when they’re standing. Everyone provides only necessary updates, and the person in charge asks necessary questions to get the necessary information.

Let employees seek out the information they need when they need it. So, make updated project material, timelines, and task lists available in a centralized location that all necessary employees can access, like within a Google Doc or other collaboration tools. This can replace status updates all together. If a Google Doc is kept up to date, employees can check for the information they need to complete their tasks at any time or location.

Geoff McQueen is the founder and CEO of AffinityLive, a company that creates cloud-based CRM, project management, service and billing software for the professional service sector. Previously, McQueen created and built a successful digital agency in Australia. Now based in San Francisco, McQueen is a sought-after writer and speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and growing a successful service business.